SHAMBHALA SUN MAY 2012
52
in one way or another in reference to death, absence,
disappearing.
So this dream intrigues and confuses me. Is my
mother-in-law about to pass over from life to death,
though temporarily stuck in the crowded doorway? If
that’s the logic of the dream, then I must be dead, stuck
in that same doorway as I try to pass through to life. Of course
this makes no sense! But then, the longer I contemplate life and
death, the less sense they make. Sometimes I wonder whether
life and death isn’t merely a conceptual framework we confuse
ourselves with. Of course people do seem to disappear, and, this
having been the case generally with others, it seems reasonable
to assume that it will be the case for us at some point. But how
to understand this? And how to account for the many anomalies
that appear when you look closely, such as reported appearances
of ghosts and other visitations from the dead, reincarnation, and
so on.
It is very telling that some religions refer to death as “eternal
life,” and that in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta the Buddha doesn’t
die. He enters parinirvana, full extinction, which is something
other than death. In Buddhism generally, death isn’t death—it’s
a staging area for further life. So there are many respectable and
less respectable reasons to wonder about the question of death.
There are a lot of older people in the Buddhist communities
in which I practice. Some are in their seventies and eighties, oth-
ers in their sixties, like me. Because of this, the theme of death
and impermanence is always on our minds and seems to come
up again and again in the teachings we study. All conditioned
things pass away. Nothing remains as it was. The body changes
and weakens as it ages. In response to this, and to a lifetime’s
experience, the mind changes as well. The way one thinks of,
views, and feels about life and the world is different. Even the
same thoughts one had in youth or midlife take on a different
flavor when held in older age. The other day a friend about my
age, who in her youth studied Zen with the great master Song
Sa Nim, told me, “He always said, ‘Soon dead!’ I understood the
words then as being true: very Zen, and almost funny. Now they
seem personal and poignant.”
“All conditioned things have the nature of vanishing.” What is
impermanence after all? When we’re young we know that death
is coming, but it will probably come later, so we don’t have to be
so concerned with it now. And even if we are concerned with it in
youth, as I was, the concern is philosophical. When we are older we
know death is coming sooner rather than later, so we take it more
personally. But do we really know what we are talking about?
Death may be the ultimate loss, the ultimate impermanence,
but even on a lesser, everyday scale, impermanence and the loss
it entails still happens more or less “later.” Something is here now
in a particular way; later it will not be. I am or have something
now; later I will not. But “later” is the safest of all time frames.
It can be safely ignored because it’s not now—it’s later, and later
never comes. And even if it does, we don’t have to worry about it
now. We can worry about it later. For most of us most
of the time, impermanence seems irrelevant.
But in truth, impermanence isn’t later; it’s now. “All
conditioned things have the nature of vanishing.” Right
now, as they appear before us, they have that nature. It’s
not that something vanishes later. Right now, everything
is in some way—though we don’t understand in what way—van-
ishing before our very eyes. Squeezing uncomfortably through the
narrow doorway of now, we don’t know whether we are coming
or going. Impermanence may be a deeper thought than we at first
appreciate.
Impermanence is not only loss; it is also change, and change
can be refreshing, renewing. In fact, change is always both good
and bad, because change, even when it is refreshing, always
entails loss. Nothing new appears unless something old ceases. As
they say on New Year’s Eve, “Out with the old, in with the new,”
a happy and a sad occasion. As with the scene in the Mahapa-
rinibbana Sutta, there’s despair and equanimity at the same time.
Impermanence is both.
In one of his most important essays, the great twelfth-century
Japanese Zen master Dogen writes, “Impermanence is itself Buddha
Nature.” This seems quite different from the classical Buddhist
notion of impermanence, which emphasizes the loss side of the loss/
change/renewal equation. For Dogen, impermanence isn’t a prob-
lem to be overcome with diligent effort on the path. Impermanence
is the path. Practice isn’t the way to cope with or overcome imper-
manence. It is the way to fully appreciate and live it.
“If you want to understand Buddha Nature,” Dogen writes,
“you should intimately observe cause and effect over time.
When the time is ripe, Buddha Nature manifests.” In explaining
this teaching, Dogen, in his usual inside-out, upside-down way
(Dogen is unique among Zen Masters in his intricately detailed lit-
erary style, which usually involves very counterconceptual ways of
understanding typical concepts), writes that practice isn’t so much
a matter of changing or improving the conditions of your inner or
outer life, as a way of fully embracing and appreciating those con-
ditions, especially the condition of impermanence and loss. When
you practice, “the time becomes ripe.” While this phrase naturally
implies a “later” (something unripe ripens in time), Dogen under-
stands it is the opposite way: Time is always ripe. Buddha Nature
always manifests in time, because time is always impermanence.
Of course time is impermanence and impermanence is time!
Time is change, development, loss. Present time is ungraspable:
as soon as it occurs it immediately falls into the past. As soon as
I am here, I am gone. If this were not so, how could the me of
this moment ever give way to the me of the following moment?
Unless the first me disappears, clearing the way, the second me
cannot appear. So my being here is thanks to my not being here.
If I were not not here I couldn’t be here!
In words, this becomes very quickly paradoxical and absurd,
but in living, it seems to be exactly the case. Logically it must be
so, and once in a while (especially in a long meditation retreat)
EMBRACE
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